Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Dixon
The heavy sheriff’s station door slammed shut behind me from the momentum of its own weight when I entered, and the only person in the room looked up from a mass of papers on her desk.
She was my brother’s girl, the one he’d brought with him when he came out to California four years ago to try to talk me into coming home.
I hadn’t been ready then, though, and Brand showing up had made that pretty clear to me.
He’d wanted me to face my past, but when they’d left and I spent the next week wide-eyed and jonesing at three in the morning, I knew for sure I wasn’t ready. Not even close.
That was when I really went off the grid—Idaho, Alaska, and then I ended up in the PNW, acting like a fucking lumberjack in the Cascades, chopping down trees for a guy who gave me a cabin to live in and an honest wage.
It was there I finally came to terms with myself in the dead of winter, when I couldn’t get down the mountain for food or water, nursing an empty stomach and frostbit fingers. That was when I finally knew I needed my family again and that I was ready to face them… and ready for them to need me.
My brother’s girl—shit, what’s her name?
For the life of me, I couldn’t remember.
She didn’t say anything, but she looked up at me, and I watched as realization dawned in her eyes.
She lifted the phone on her desk so slowly, it looked like she was moving in slow motion, and she pressed it to her ear, hit a button with a long finger, then spoke quietly, “Get out here right now.”
She hung up the phone and stood, smoothing wrinkles out of her uniform pants with flat hands. “Dixon.”
“Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.” Looking at the nametag over the pocket of her stiff brown shirt, it read R. Fitts-Lee, and then I remembered. “Wait. Roxanne? You were my brother’s girl.”
“Roxi.” She nodded. “And now I’m his wife.”
A door slammed somewhere in the back hallway. I still remembered what that long, daunting corridor looked like from my teens and all the times I’d been dragged back to the sheriff’s office.
I wasn’t in trouble now, but my tongue felt thick and my heart started racing again. “Y’all got married?” I said to Roxi, but my eyes didn’t stray from the hallway. “I’m sorry I missed it. That’s great. Congrat—”
But my best wishes stuck in my throat when my baby sister appeared at the end of the hallway.
Tears filled Abey’s eyes, and she rushed toward me and threw her arms around my neck, reaching up on the tips of her work boots to hug me.
I had been right to find her first. My sister was the embodiment of light and love, and her acceptance of me bolstered me and infused me with the confidence I needed to face the rest of our family.
She held on tight, and tentatively, I hugged back, letting feathery wisps of her hair that had frizzed out of its bun tickle my cheek while I remembered the last time she’d tried to hug me, when I broke my arm because I had been too drunk to stand upright on my own.
But I’d pushed her away then, and that broken arm was the reason I’d been in the passenger seat of my sister-in-law’s truck the day she died. And it was maybe the reason the CPR I’d administered hadn’t worked.
The pain pills the hospital had given me for the break had been the reason I’d discovered heroin.
And for a long time, I blamed those doctors for my dependence, but the truth was that my addiction was my own damn fault.
I knew the first time I took one that those pills would lead me to Hell if I kept taking them.
I remembered the moment I held the pill bottle over my toilet, but I didn’t dump them.
I pocketed them and shoved two in my mouth.
It was the last decision I remembered making before Hell really had rained its fire over my life. And it was the decision I regretted more than any other because it led to the most dire mistakes I’d ever made.
Abey let go and began patting me all over, like she was trying to make sure I was real and at the same time check me for weapons or drugs. She pulled back and looked in my eyes. “Are you okay? When did you get here? Have you been home yet?”
“Yes, I’m okay. I just got here, and no, I haven’t been home yet.”
“Shit,” she said. “Mama’s gonna lose her mind.”
“How is Merv? How’s her health?” I asked, using the nickname we’d given her years ago.
She wasn’t “Mama” in my head anymore. Good manners would make me call her “Mama” to her face, but inside, the name was too vulnerable, too painful, because mamas were supposed to protect and defend.
Mervella Lee hadn’t so much, and part of the reason I’d come home hinged on being able to flip some darkness from my past into the light of day.
Merv would be pretty integral to that objective.
But she wasn’t the main reason I’d come home. That honor went to Stu.
And to me.
“She’s good. Older than you’ll remember, but she’s healthy. Um, okay, can you wait for me? The mayor’s sittin’ in my office right now and we’re on a video call with the governor. Or Roxi could drive you to the ranch.”
Abey looked at her deputy, and Roxi nodded agreement, but I didn’t want to inconvenience her.
“Thanks, but I need to stop in at the community center next door. I checked online, and they have AA and NA meetings there. I wanna get the schedule. I’ll wait for you, if that’s alright? I might grab somethin’ from the coffee shop.”
“Yeah,” my sister said, wiping an escaped tear from under her eye with her index finger, “that’s fine. I’ll be a half hour probably.” She grabbed hold of my hand, squeezed, and smiled so widely that my heart ached. “Just… don’t leave, okay?”
Shaking my head, I promised, “I won’t.”
No, I wouldn’t be doing that. No more running. I’d come home to stay. It was fixing to be painful and uncomfortable, but my son was a bright and shining tether to my hometown, and there was no goddamn way I’d risk losing my grip on it again.
When I left the station and headed across the alleyway to Ace’s House, Wisper’s community center, the midday sun blinded me. I’d left my sunglasses in a roadside john somewhere in northern Nevada and hadn’t bothered to replace them, but now I wished I had.
There used to be a sundry shop down Main Street. Henly was the owner’s name, and if he was still running it, I was betting they’d have some cheap shades. If I had time after talking to the community center people, I’d head that way and see what I could find.
When I was a kid, the building I had just entered housed the local newspaper’s offices. Merv could probably tell me when that had gone out of business and been bought by whoever turned it into a community center, but somehow, it still smelled the same, like musty, yellowed paper and wet ink.
As my feet crossed the threshold, a memory bubbled up from the depths of my subconscious of my dad dragging me along to place an ad in the paper for summer help on our sheep farm.
My brothers and I helped after school, but we had been young and Noah Lee needed grown men with muscles and lambing experience.
Usually, I worked hard not to let memories of him enter my active thoughts, not unless my ass was glued to the seat of a chair in a therapist’s office, but this memory seemed innocent enough.
There were no fists shaping the memory or words of degradation, just a little boy following the man he looked up to more than anyone into an old brick building, hoping that after, his dad might take him for an ice cream cone or a milkshake.
The memory was too fuzzy for me to see through it, so I couldn’t remember if the day had ended with a dairy overdose.
It was doubtful, though, since the man had never deigned to acknowledge me unless he was cussing me, but it felt fitting to me that as I came to inquire about NA meetings at the community center, a memory of Noah Lee would creep up.
His love—or more precisely, the lack of it—was the catalyst to my addiction, and the original reason I needed meetings in the first place.
“How can I help you?” a man asked, and I shook the memory away as I focused on his face. He wasn’t familiar.
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “I heard y’all hold meetings here?”
“We do,” he said. “What kind of meetings are you looking for? We have all kinds of meetings here.”
The knowing look in the man’s shrewd eyes told me he’d taken one look at me and knew exactly what I was asking, but he wasn’t about to let me off the hook.
“NA or AA.”
He nodded. “Come with me,” he said, and he turned and didn’t wait for me to follow him to an office.
I shut the door quietly behind me when I entered, and he sat behind a big mahogany desk. He pulled open a drawer and took out a piece of paper.
“The meeting times are listed here. They don’t change often, but if there’s ever a scheduling issue or we have bad weather, you can find updates on our website. The address is there.” He set the paper on the desk, pushed it in my direction, and pointed to a blur of print at the bottom.
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing the paper. I folded it and shoved it in my back pocket.
“Right now, we only offer AA meetings. We had a guy who ran the NA meetings, but he and his wife recently moved, so until we find someone else, you’re welcome at AA. The meetings aren’t formal, and there’s usually crossover anyway.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “An addict’s an addict, and I’m no stranger to alcohol.”
“Me either,” he said. “I’m Theo by the way. Are you new in town?”
Reaching across the desk, I shook his hand. “Dixon. Technically, yeah, I guess I am. I grew up here, but I’ve been away a long time.”
“Welcome home, Dixon.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s a meeting tomorrow morning if you’re interested.”
“I’ll be here,” I said, thinking that, after facing the rest of my family, a meeting would be more than necessary.